6 Treffer

Over a period of 30 years, ITU-T’s Specification and Description Language (SDL) has matured to a sophisticated formal modelling language for distributed systems and communication protocols. The language definition of SDL-2000, the latest version of SDL, is complex and difficult to maintain. Full tool support for SDL is costly to implement. Therefore, only subsets of SDL are currently supported by tools. These SDL subsets - called SDL profiles - already cover a wide range of systems, and are often suffcient in practice. In this report, we present our approach for extracting the formal semantics for SDL profiles from the complete SDL semantics. We then formalise the approach, present our SDL-profile tool, and report on our experiences.

The provision of network Quality-of-Service (network QoS) in wireless (ad-hoc) networks is a major challenge in the development of future communication systems. Before designing and implementing these systems, the network QoS requirements are to be specified. Existing approaches to the specification of network QoS requirements are mainly focused on specific domains or individual system layers. In this paper, we present a holistic, comprehensive formalization of network QoS requirements, across layers. QoS requirements are specified on each layer by defining QoS domain, consisting of QoS performance, reliability, and guarantee, and QoS scalability, with utility and cost functions. Furthermore, we derive preorders on multi-dimensional QoS domains, and present criteria to reduce these domains, leading to a manageable subset of QoS values that is sufficient for system design and implementation. We illustrate our approach by examples from the case study Wireless Video Transmission.

The provision of network Quality-of-Service (network QoS) in wireless (ad-hoc) networks is a major challenge in the development of future communication systems. Before designing and implementing these systems, the network QoS requirements are to be specified. Since QoS functionalities are integrated across layers and hence QoS specifications exist on different system layers, a QoS mapping technique is needed to translate the specifications into each other. In this paper, we formalize the relationship between layers. Based on a comprehensive and holistic formalization of network QoS requirements, we define two kinds of QoS mappings. QoS domain mappings associate QoS domains of two abstraction levels. QoS scalability mappings associate utility and cost functions of two abstraction levels. We illustrate our approach by examples from the case study Wireless Video Transmission.

This report explains basic notions and concepts of Abstract State Machines (ASM) as well as notation for defining ASM models. The objective here is to provide an intuitive understanding of the formalism; for a rigorous definition of the mathematical foundations of ASM, the reader is referred to [2] and [3]. Further references on ASM-related material can be found on the ASM Web Pages [1].

The Basic Reference Model of ODP introduces a number of basic concepts in order to provide a common basis for the development of a coherent set of standards. To achieve this objective, a clear understanding of the basic concepts is one prerequisite. This paper makes an effort at clarifying some of the basic concepts independently of standardized or non-standardized formal description techniques. Among the basic concepts considered here are: agent, action, interaction, interaction point, architecture, behaviour, system, composition, refinement, and abstraction. In a case study, it is then shown how these basic concepts can be represented in a formal specification written in temporal logic.

UML and SDL are languages for the development of software systems that have different origins, and have evolved separately for many years. Recently, it can be observed that OMG and ITU, the standardisation bodies responsible for UML and SDL, respectively, are making efforts to harmonise these languages. So far, harmonisation takes place mainly on a conceptual level, by extending and aligning the set of language concepts. In this paper, we argue that harmonisation of languages can be approached both from a syntactic and semantic perspective. We show how a common syntactical basis can be derived from the analysis of the UML meta-model
and the SDL abstract grammar. For this purpose, conceptually sound and well-founded mappings from meta-models to abstract grammars and vice versa are defined and applied. On the semantic level, a comparison between corresponding language constructs is performed.